Related NARA Resources

Foreign Aid and Counterinsurgency

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other United States Foreign Assistance Agencies in Vietnam, 1950-1967

Founded in 1961 under the administration of John F. Kennedy (1960-1963), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) inherited a wide range of civilian assistance programs launched in Vietnam by other government entities, as well as a series of predecessor agencies that included the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA, 1948-1951), the Mutual Security Agency (MSA, 1951-1953); the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA, 1950-1954); the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA, 1953-1955); and the International Cooperation Agency (ICA, 1951-1961).

American assistance to the Vietnamese began before 1954, when Communist forces ended over a century of French colonial dominance at the Siege of Điện Biên Phủ. The Americans then continued to support civil society in the South after 1955, when the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) declared its independence and elected Ngô Đình Diệm as president. President Ngô remained head of state with American aid until his assassination on November 2, 1963 by a rival military faction.

Through trial and error over the next two decades, increasing tensions between South Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Communist North Vietnam), internal political conflict, and the emergence after 1958 of an armed insurgency under Communist leadership in the South collectively drove the American assistance agencies to improvise new approaches to the challenges of social instability, economic development, and expanding insurgency.

By 1967, President Lyndon Johnson sought to improve counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam by officially coordinating many of these civilian assistance programs with military operations under an unprecedented interagency organization known as CORDS, or “Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.” President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) subsequently continued the interagency effort, referring to the acronym as “Civil Operations and Rural Development Support.”

However, records of civilian programs implemented in Vietnam from before Điện Biên Phủ through the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 do appear in RG 469 and RG 286. These records reflect the long evolution of American programs over two decades of armed conflict in Vietnam, as well as the interplay between established entities within USAID and CORDS after 1967. Records demonstrating the diversity of civilian initiatives to stabilize and develop civil society in the Republic of Vietnam include: